Sunday, January 13, 2013

Biology vs. school "science"

Darkest six weeks of the year are behind us now.
In a few weeks, the crocuses break through the ground.

The solid stuff of crocuses is mostly made from carbon dioxide--we release some with every breath.

Backyard crocus, February 2011

The carbon dioxide we release wended its way from deep inside our cells, from our mitochondria, tiny membrane-wrapped bodies that strip the electrons off the food we eat, electrons trapped in awkwardly unstable positions, ultimately relaxed again as they join with oxygen molecules, to form water.

Mitochondria are not human--they have their own DNA, reproduce (mostly) without our help. Every one you have came from those in your mother's egg. They have their own history.

When we starve, we lose most of our weight through our lungs as countless particles of carbon dioxide.

It takes a lot of energy to split those water molecules again, to excite those electrons, to smush CO2 back into the stuff of plants.

The sun provides the energy. And it's coming back, as it has again and again and again.

***

I
hardly teach biology anymore--I teach sophistry. Learn the magic words,
and the patterns among the magic words, and you are wise.

polymerase

peptide bond

phospholipid bilayer

I get paid reasonably well to do this, and so long as my students fill in the Holy Scantrons read by the Great Machine
in Trenton, and if the pattern comes close enough to the patterns
discerned as truth, my students are certified as worthy of participating
on our new global workforce, machina ex deus.

If
you never care to watch the sun's annual demise and rebirth, you will never be more than a
technician. That seems to be OK to just about everybody these
days--technicians are a lot easier to manage than philosophers, and
they're certainly easier to please.

And if I accept my role as just a 21st century teacher, delivering some bon mots to help my lambs pass the PARCC exam, then I will never be more than a technician, either.

The
sun has started its climb north again. The winter chill reminds
those of us closer to our end than our beginning that maybe, just
maybe, safety isn't the primary goal in a life that will certainly end
in death.

Time to get moving.

It's really not all that complicated, this life/death thing. You are, and then you're not.